


Girl Like You

by dashery



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Yellow Yard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 21:54:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3184520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashery/pseuds/dashery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Nanna, what were <i>you</i> like?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Girl Like You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



Jade is the crackle of power before one can classify it as heat or plasma, the longest night of winter, stars and hydrogen fusion and the hunt. She wears the night on her sleeve and her hair is tangled, and she is a girl, oh, so young.

That tangled hair is driving Nannasprite up the wall. Or it would, if she wouldn't go right through it! Hoo hoo hoo.

"Dear, would you like me to help you with that?"

Jade looks up from where she's sitting strangely before her computer, one foot pulled up under her but the other stretched onto her desk, sparkling slippers tossed to the floor. Her striped toes wiggle the way a dog's tail might.

"Hmm? With what?"

Both Jade's hands are occupied with the gadgetry she's taking apart, and for a painful moment, Nanna remembers another pair of hands--shorter, thicker fingers, but the same broad palms, the same dirt ground into the knuckles, though Jade's are browner, have seen more sun. Her dear brother had loved to tinker, too.

But with Jade's hands busy, all that's controlling the brush is her own distracted power, and as useful as it must be to float plates and carry planets with nothing more than her mind, her witchy telekinesis is not doing much for her hair. The poor brush is getting rather stuck in there. Nannasprite drifts over and disentangles the brush from the thicket, paying no mind to how Jade pauses in her fiddling to focus on Nanna's movements.

"Well, it's no business of mine, but you can humor your old grandmother, can't you, dear? We haven't had much of a chance to talk, you know!"

Leaving her brush-wielding hand to work through the knots in that mass of hair--more like hers, that, though it's difficult to tell--Nannasprite moves to sit on the desk beside Jade's computer. Spritely dismemberment has it perks, after all, and this way she can speak to her brother's granddaughter face to face. Her great-niece. Her daughter.

Jade's eyes are sharp and honest, and she smiles with her mouth open, Harley dimples in her cheeks.

"Well, okay! I mean, you already started, anyway." She turns her attention to the machinery in her hands again. "And it's kind of nice! You know, I've never had anyone help me with my hair before. Bec didn't really have the equipment for it." She sighs and her smile closes, fades. "He was just a dog."

Nannasprite brushes away, careful to mind Jade's thickly furred, flicking ears. "Oh, yes. Your grandfather just adored your Becquerel's genetic predecessor. Halley, his name was."

That piques Jade's attention, just as Nanna thought it might. "You had a dog, too? What was he like?" Another thought occurs to her, and Jade pulls her leg down and leans forward, green eyes (green like his, bright like hers) sparking. "What was Grandpa like?"

"Hoo hoo! Well, he was quite the scalawag, you can bet your garters on that! He and I used to get up to such mischief, when the old witch wasn't looking..."

And she tells Jade of the adventures, of taking down the good Colonel's books and practicing his japery in secret, of all the childhood rebellion they could muster in their hoots and laughter. She mimics her dear brother's voice, making Jade laugh at the familiarly odd cadence to his words, the accent that they'd both loved. When she gets to explain how vile the Batterwitch was, how she'd mistreated them under her manipulative prongs, she makes a fist of her free hand, shakes it at the sky. She's an excellent storyteller, She knows this.

But at some point, Jade has stopped hanging on every word. She studies Nannasprite as if she were one of Jade's bits of robot, something to break down and build up again in order to understand the whole, to know every bit of her and where she fits into the world.

"Jade, dear?"

"Nanna, what were _you_ like?"

The question gives Nannasprite pause like none of John's questions, so here-and-now, so charming, so full of breezy exasperation that he did and didn't mean, did. Because as excellent a storyteller as she is, and as vital the story she has to tell both for her niece-grandchild-daughter's sake, as central a role as Nanna plays within it, as witness, she realizes that she hasn't said anything at all about that.

Not even her name.

And for a moment, she remembers it all as something she saw, not something she is telling, and that makes all the difference. Two wars that shook the world in her lifetime--and she, volunteer nurse, who patched the dead and the dying and learned what triage was. She who had fled but was not yet free, who knew the witch watched but allowed her to learn the stink of human cruelty, the violence of her own species she wished to save from the Empress's claws. More wars after that, ones she didn't see, caught up in her own home and her own uncertainty.

She who knew she'd given up glory for comfort, battle for life.

She'd raised a child. Her child grew. She knew what would become of her and what she had yet to do. She'd joked and given her whole life to jokes, knowing that everything, in the end, came down to laughter. Came down to that spark of life between people, because a joke with no one to hear it is something dead, something the Batterwitch would find funny and wrong, so wrong.

"My name was Jane. Jane Egbert."

Nanna is the crackle of the hearth on the first day of winter, and just as powerful, and, just as much, just as achingly, a child.

"I was just a girl."

And she smiles, a mischievous, bucktoothed grin that makes her eyes crinkle, makes all the faint wrinkles in her face light up like the best joke ever told, because that's all a joke is: a secret, half-shared.

Her daughter-granddaughter is a goddess, a fighter. She transforms the world because she, the world, transforms.

"A girl like you."


End file.
